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Embarcadero bets on Blackberry, dismisses Windows Phone

Submitted by ldsandon on Thu, 2013/09/26 - 21:02

In his post Blackberry is Still Ahead of Microsoft, Jim McKeeth uses US numbers only to try to demonstrate that Embarcadero should never support Windows Phone, up to the point to say that Blackberry is ahead of it. Unluckily, if you look at numbers outside the US, for example here, they tell a different story, And we're not talking about developing countries like India (although that could be a huge market as well), but countries like Germany (where iOS has only a fourth of the market share it has in the US), France, Italy and Great Britain - about a 240 million people market.

It wasn't needed, but it shows that when it comes to strategic decisions, Embarcadero people have no clue.

But probably there's a reason they hate WP so much, and truly hope it fails. FireMonkey would have a very hard time in supporting it, because WP UI design and way of working are very different from iOS and Android - a simple skin would not be enough - and it would cripple they whole "write once, deploy anywhere" approach.

Thereby they don't care behind WP there's a company like MS - and its large cash pile, and now an hardware division able to deliver good phones - while behind Blackberry there's only a company like RIM that is going to go bankrupt. So they don't plan properly, they just put their heads under the sand, and hope WP goes away....

Update (2013-10-1): Kantar Worldpanel ComTech reports "Windows Phone 8 has posted its highest ever sales share of 9.2% across the five major European markets* and is now within one percentage point of iOS in Germany... Windows Phone has hit double digit sales share figures in France and Great Britain with 10.8% and 12% respectively... BlackBerry’s troubles continue; the operating system now accounts for just 2.4% of sales across the big five European markets and 1.8% in the United States". It's only Embarcadero that thinks Blackberry is still ahead of Microsoft...